“I think that it was definitely a learning process for everybody,” Molino recalls of the discussions leading up to his family’s mid-2003 IPO. “We would occasionally bring everybody together, maybe go in the boardroom, and hash things out. The people who were really involved in the decision were myself, my four siblings and my mother—the principal shareholder group—and we really went back and forth for a long time looking at the private equity versus the IPO option. We came very, very close to negotiating a private equity transaction.”

The private equity deal was less attractive because the veto rights being sought by the investors would have tied the family’s hands, despite their not selling a majority stake in the company. “For our culture, the kind of company that we were, it would not have worked,” Molina notes. “We would not have been happy. So that’s why we decided to go public.” The family has retained a 70 percent stake in the company.

Preparing for an IPO or, in some cases a private equity acquisition, may require painful changes to the company roster. One of the first things an investment bank will advise an entrepreneur looking to go public is: Fire your family. Institutional investors do not like to see a corporate hierarchy stuffed full of brothers, sisters and cousins. Board independence is also a pressing issue, especially with corporate governance being such a high-profile topic with investors.